Klingons, Sugar, Accessibility, Computing Without Electricity

January 29, 2009

By
Akkana Peck

This is your faithful correspondent, reporting from LinuxConf
Australia (LCA) in Hobart, Tasmania, where it's been an eventful week
packed with Linux information.

The week started with two days of "miniconfs" on topics ranging from
kernel development to system administration to gaming to women in
Linux. Miniconfs are less formal than the main conference, and they
usually include good discussion sessions.

On Monday, I divided my time between
the kernel miniconf and the LinuxChix miniconf. The kernel talks
included good discussions of details like the difficulties of
parallel programming and the problems involved with ACPI handling.
Over at the LinuxChix miniconf, we listened to useful talks like
Jacinta Richardson's "On Speaking", a discussion session on how to
get more schoolgirls involved with computers, and a seminar on "Geek
Parenting." LinuxChix and Google also hosted a barbecue lunch.
I also heard lots of good reports from the System Administration
miniconf.

Miniconfs continued on Tuesday. Again, I heard good reports from
the sysadmin miniconf, and there were also miniconfs on topics
including multimedia, virtualization, and "Free as in Freedom",
the last including talks on copyright law, how to convince outsiders
of the benefits of free software, citizen reporting and how to avoid
getting sued, and the problem of freeing geographic and mapping data.

The regular conference talks began on Wednesday.
Keith Packard reported on improvements in X since this time last year:
there have been a surprising number of improvements, including a new
mechanism called GEM to help in sharing data between X and the kernel.
It isn't usable on all graphics cards yet, but if and when it is it
should help performance quite a bit. Packard's co-worker Carl Worth
followed up with a highly useful discussion of how to debug the Linux
graphics pipeline.

For those not interested in the gory details of X, a talk in the same
time slot by Thomas Sprinkmeier on "Remote Management System. Really
Remote" discussed the problems of communicating with computers in
locations so remote that they lack not only internet access but also
power. He solved the power problem by setting up a generator that
could be turned on from a signal over a 3G modem, kept powered by a
solar panel.

Jonathan Corbet gave a talk on how to get involved with the kernel
development process and what stages a change goes through in order to
get included in the mainline kernel.
The day also featured two Firefox talks: my talk on hacking
Mozilla code and Jason White's talk on a web accessibility framework
called Orca. On Wednesday evening there was a followup BOF ("Birds Of
a Feather" meeting) to discuss what the Mozilla Foundation should
do with its money.

Thursday opened with talks on Sugar, the software environment used for
the One Laptop Per Child XO laptops, as well as better user
documentation and AIO in the kernel. But I couldn't resist Paul
Fenwick's talk on The Art of Klingon Programming, which turned out
to be about a new and useful error trapping mechanism for Perl.